New AMD Zen CPU details have emerged

This is a huge show of confidence for AMD, comparing their new flagship to a current generation Intel CPU that currently costs around $1000.

These slides also mention an upcoming 32-core 64-thread Zen based server CPU, matching the specifications of the AMD Zen engineering samples that are allegedly available to some motherboard manufacturers. These new server chips will use AMD's upcoming SP3 server platform while their desktop counterparts will use the upcoming AMD AM4 socket.

Below are the specifications of the previously leaked AMD Zen engineering samples, which are should be running at lower clock speeds than their retail equivalents.

The clock speeds of these CPUs do not reflect what AMD's final Zen clock speeds will be, meaning that if AMD can increase their clock speeds to the same heights as their older Bulldozer series CPUs, they will be able to achieve performance that should be competitive with some of Intel's X99 CPUs.

4-core

8-core

24-core

32-core

Socket

AM4

AM4

SP3

SP3

Boost Clock Speed

3.2GHz

3.2GHz

2.75GHz

2.9GHz

Base Clock Speed

2.8GHz

2.8GHz

-

-

TDP

65W

95W

150W

180W

L2 Cache

2MB

4MB

12MB

16MB

L3 Cache

8MB

16MB

48MB

64MB

In the above slide AMD specifically compares AMD's Zen "Summit Ridge" flagship CPU to Intel's Broadwell-e i7 6900K, stating that both configurations offered almost identical performance when running at the same clock speeds.

Below we have compared the known specifications of both CPUs, though at this time we do not know how AMD's Zen CPU will be priced and how well AMD's Zen architecture will compare to Intel's modern Broadwell and Skylake architectures in other applications.

Zen will also feature lower latency L1 cache, more L2 cache when compared to older AMD architectures and up to 5x the cache bandwidth per core when compared to AMD's Excavator architecture.

It seems that AMD has been working exceptionally hard to make sure that Zen has none of the weak spots that their Bulldozer line had, hopefully allowing AMD to release some competitive CPU products by the start 2017.

From their original Zen announcement, AMD has been saying that Bulldozer will offer increased instructions-per-clock over their older Excavator architecture but now AMD has taken things up a notch by showing us not only the performance gains of Zen but also their increased power efficiency.

With decreased energy requirements per cycle and increased instructions-per-clock AMD's Zen architecture will offer performance that is not only higher than AMD's previous CPUs but at a much lower wattage, hopefully allowing AMD to gain back some market share in the notebook market as well as help Zen CPUs run cool and quiet under load.

Right now it looks like AMD's Zen CPUs will be hitting the market in late 2016 or early 2017. We will keep you up to date with additional information as we find out more.

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